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West Crescent Drive in the Vista Las Palmas neighborhood in Palm Springs is a quiet neighborhood street where modernist homes built in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s snug up against the side of the mountain.

One of those homes – a blue and white six-bedroom manse built in 1958 – is a vacation rental that has drawn the ire of Michael Ziskind, who lives next door.

“They don’t screen their renters, and it is a consistent recurring problem,” said Ziskind. “And as a result of that, their renters have in the past, on multiple occasions, have been cited.”

“It is a big problem,” continued Ziskind, who moved to this neighborhood about seven years ago from the Washington D.C. area and has become the leader of a group known as Protect Our Neighborhoods, which seeks to limit the impacts short term rentals have on communities.

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A vacation rental house, operated by the ACME House Company, located in the Movie Colony neighborhood of Palm Springs on Thursday, November 10, 2016.(Photo: Richard Lui/The Desert Sun)

Walking a little farther down the street one recent afternoon he pointed to a well-kept “Swiss-Miss” A-frame home next door to the six-bedroom vacation rental – which is for sale with an asking price of about $2.3 million – which also functions as a short-term rental allowing for the two homes to be at-times rented together, attracting upwards of two-dozen guests to the neighborhood.

“So between the parking and the trash and the red plastic cups on Monday morning in the street, and so forth and so on,” said Ziskind, his voice trailing off, as he illuminated one aspect of a widening disconnect between full-time residents and the out-of-town visitors who have been flocking to Palm Springs as the city has emerged as a popular vacation destination for the sort of young, moneyed classes tourism officials, the hospitality industry and others are so quick to court.

The concentration of vacation rentals -- and their occasional disturbances -- in Vista Las Palmas and other neighborhoods like Deepwell and Movie Colony highlight the fractures the homes can form in communities, prompting the city to revisit its vacation rentals policies. The topic has placed home-owners against each other and was the number one issue new City Council members like Geoff Kors and J.R. Roberts said they heard on the campaign trail a year ago.

Palm Springs is hardly alone in grappling with how to regulate vacation rentals. Other tourism-oriented cities around the state have also had or are figuring out how to keep peace between longtime homeowners and those in the industry.

The rub comes not just from late-night carousing – which the vacation rentals industry stresses is not near as prolific and rowdy as its critics might suggest – but what elected officials and locals say is a fundamental shift in neighborhood character and composition. A world where neighbors know each other, visit and help out has morphed into a landscape peopled by out-town-owners and renters, opponents of vacation rentals contend.

“We really don’t know a lot of our neighbors anymore,” Bonnie Ruttan, who also lives in Vista Las Palmas, told the Palm Springs City Council during a recent special meeting to discuss vacation rentals issues.

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A vacation rental house, operated by the ACME House Company, located in the Movie Colony neighborhood of Palm Springs on Thursday, November 10, 2016.(Photo: Richard Lui/The Desert Sun)

Vacation rental owners and proponents of the properties, on the other hand, say many of the complaints are over-blown and are not reflective of the opinions of the vast majority of the Palm Springs population.

“They’re all against it. Everybody’s against it,” remarked Mark Schniepp, an economist and founder of the California Economic Forecast, a private consulting firm that has studied vacation rentals in numerous communities, summing up the general attitude the industry has stirred across California. "I liken it to the 1692 Salem Witch Trials.”

The number of registered short-term rentals in Palm Springs has reached about 2,000 units, say city officials, a 92 percent increase since 2009. (It’s estimated there may about 1,000 additional units operating illegally on sites like Airbnb or VRBO.)

There are about 36,300 housing units in Palm Springs, according to the U.S Census American Community Survey, which means about 6 percent of homes in the city function as some form of vacation rental.

“One of the houses across the street, he lives out of town and rents his house and asked if we’d hold a key for him. And I said no. You know, I’m not going to hold a key for your rental house,” said Ruttan. “I would have held a key for a neighbor. That’s what we always did for neighbors. That’s what we did for the neighbor that lived there, before this person bought it. And I think that’s the difference, you know, that kind of relationship and that kind of connection that we don’t have anymore.”

“I just feel badly. We’re so invested personally in the community,” she added.

Change afoot

In the last several months a vacation rentals subcommittee made of council members J.R. Roberts and Geoff Kors have held about seven public meetings to hear from industry and neighborhood representatives in an effort to draft a list of changes to make to the city’s existing vacation rentals ordinance to propose to the full City Council. Those changes are due at the end of the month and will be considered during another special meeting, set for Nov. 30.

Some of the set of objectives – the filters some of the various policy ideas are passed through – include concepts like, vacation rentals should be ancillary use of a home, and not a “business for the benefit of investors or for real estate speculation,” and allow “some level of short-term rentals” in Palm Springs as an alternative lodging option.

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A vacation rental house, operated by the ACME House Company, located in the Movie Colony neighborhood of Palm Springs on Thursday, November 10, 2016.(Photo: Richard Lui/The Desert Sun)

“We want to see vacation rentals continue here. But we want to make sure that it’s done in a way that meets a lot of objectives,” said Kors at a Nov. 3 meeting of the subcommittee.

“It’s not just about enforcement and tax revenues. It’s about community and neighborhoods as well,” said Roberts at a special council meeting last month. “And I think that’s hugely important in our considerations. One of the things that we love about Palm Springs… Is we love the small-town qualities that we enjoy here.

“If we’re not for people, we have a problem,” he added. “We’re changing the very face and character of Palm Springs.

“I think we still are a village. And I think we have to hold on to that,” said Roberts.

Industry representatives say the ordinance, drafted in 2008 and then revised in 2014, could work well, if the city would only enforce its own rules and policies.

“We know what the problem is. We know which houses are a problem. We know what to do with them. We need to enforce them,” said Kelly McLean of McLean Company Rentals, a leading and longtime vacation management agency in Palm Springs, representing hundreds of homes in the valley.

The city issued 190 citations, totaling $54,100 in fines, in the 2015-16 fiscal year, according to city records. And since Jan.1 of this year, 11 homes have had their licenses suspended, however four of those have been appealed and have hearings pending.

“Lets not create a bigger problem,” McLean implored the subcommitteerecently, urging the city to not adopt new restrictions on vacation rentals homes. “Lets focus on what we have right now. We have a good working ordinance.”

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A large crowd came out to Palm Springs City Hall Wednesday, Oct. 26 for a special City Council meeting to discuss vacation rentals.(Photo: Skip Descant/ The Desert Sun)

“You have not given this ordinance an opportunity to work,” Mike McLean, also of McLean Company Rentals, told the committee. “To say that enforcement is not the issue, it is the issue.”

Enforcement, said Roberts, “is the low-hanging fruit.”

“We do believe that we can fix a lot of this with enforcement. We agree. But it’s not the only problem we’re dealing with,” said Roberts.

Palm Springs is set to spend $1 million or more annually on beefed-up enforcement, in part through the formation of a new Department of Vacation Rentals, which will include a new vacation rentals manager position at City Hall, due to be hired any day now.

So far, two key changes to the ordinance have received the most traction, due in part to what could be achieved and an ability to enforce.

One proposal is to allow only one vacation rental permit per person. The move would eliminate investors coming into town to buy up multiple homes, say supporters.

“We believe it should be for full and part-time residents, people who actually live here at least part of the time, as opposed to investors who buy several houses and they’re really never in them,” said Kors.

The other idea would limit the number of times per year a vacation home could be rented. The number being tossed around is 25 to 30 times a year. It would be up to the owner when they want to make the home available, and for how long. Obviously, this change would encourage owners to search out longer stays since homes are generally priced per night.

'Life changing consequences'

It’s a change that could affect whether or not someone like Kris Bernard can keep her second home in Palm Springs – a home she would like to one day live in full-time.

“If the City Council limits the number of contracts I could write per year, that could have life-changing consequences for me,” Bernard told Kors and Roberts during a meeting about a week ago.

Bernard says if she were reduced to renting her home out 24 times a year, she would have to average about $2,400 per stay to break even. Today, she averages $650 per stay.

“My main concern is that I’m going to lose my house. I don’t believe that is your intention,” she told the subcommittee.

Limiting the number of times a year a home can be rented could also hurt the city’s summer tourism business, said McLean.

“The city has worked so hard to bring people here during the summertime,” said McLean at a recent council meeting. “I’m really concerned that adding those types of restrictions are going push people to rent only during peak season months.”

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A vacation rental house, operated by the ACME House Company, located in the Movie Colony neighborhood of Palm Springs on Thursday, November 10, 2016.(Photo: Richard Lui/The Desert Sun)

It’s not just vacation rental management agencies or owners of second homes who have implored the council to not tinker too strongly with the short-term rentals landscape. Support has come from the real estate community, warning of property sell-offs and a flood of home inventory onto the market.

Support has also come from at least some of the city’s hotels, as well as the Greater Palm Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau.

A study commissioned by the CVB and the Palm Springs Vacation Rental Tourism Association found nearly a million visitors to the Coachella Valley stayed in a vacation rental in 2015 and spent $530.2 million. The study, conducted by the firm Tourism Economics, also concluded vacation rentals supported 3,448 jobs in the Greater Palm Springs region in 2015.

Since July 1, to Sept. 30 transient occupancy tax collected from vacation rentals is up 4.6 percent, compared to the same three months in 2015, according to city finance documents. In the 2015-16 fiscal year, which ended June 30, Palm Springs collected just more than $6.1 million in bed taxes from the vacation rentals segment.

Another report, by Goodwin Simon Strategic Research, found that 82 percent of respondents believe the current ordinance is sufficient or goes too far. The survey polled 400 voters in Palm Springs from Sept. 17 to 22 using both landlines and cellular phones.

Another survey, which polled 731 vacation rental owners found that 8.8 percent of respondents bought the property for investment purposes, 92.7 percent would not have bought a home in Palm Springs if they knew the city “would restrict vacation rentals,” and 33.8 percent said they would sell their property if the city restricted short-term rentals to two reservations per month.

Tourism-oriented cities wrestle with rentals

Palm Springs is not alone in dealing with the vacation rentals issue. Some cities like Anaheim have banned vacation rentals altogether – a move Palm Springs officials say is “off the table” -- while other cities like Santa Barbara have placed various restrictions. San Luis Obispo, a community similar in size to Palm Springs, does not allow vacation rentals within the city limits, however, it is possible to rent out a portion of your home to a visitor.

“Vacation rentals have been illegal in this city for, I don’t know how long, for as long as we’ve had that definition in our zoning regulations,” said Michael Codron, director of community development in San Luis Obispo.

The move to keep vacation rentals out of San Luis Obispo is “to ensure the preservation of housing supply for residents, or would-be residents,” said Codron.

“In coastal California, in particular, it almost seems like you could never create enough (housing) supply to satisfy the demand,” he explained.

“And I think, to a certain degree, there’s also a ‘neighborhood preservation, (concern)’” Codron added.

That said, a review of San Luis Obispo vacation rentals on Airbnb shows some units advertised as “walking distance to downtown,” a clear indication that some homes are operating in spite of the city’s ban on vacation rentals.

“It may not be our top priority in terms of code enforcement. But we do spend time on those sites, particularly where we get complaints referred to us,” said Codron. “We’ll attempt to contact the owner to raise awareness about the local regulation.”

Schniepp, of the California Economic Forecast, said most owners have the homes for their own use, and only sparingly rent them out.

“It’s not normally a full-time operation. It will be in some areas. So it has to be looked at a case-by-case basis. But in general, we don’t see that,” he said.

As vacation rentals become more prolific, acceptance of vacation rentals by residents has been a challenge, said Schniepp.

"These are the changes that occur in a new sharing economy," he said. "We’re seeing lots of changes, rapid changes. People don’t like this kind of a change. So they protest against it. And they come up with all of these excuses and reasons why we shouldn’t do that.”

Striking a balance

Roberts, and other policy-makers, are careful to remind everyone that whatever changes Palm Springs makes to its ordinance, not everyone will be happy.

“We recognize that we’re a resort community," Roberts remarked. "We recognize that people come here to enjoy themselves. We’re not trying to kill the fun of brand of Palm Springs. What we’re trying to do is find a balance between those that want to live here, and those that want to vacation here. And it’s a balance that I think we have been trying to find since day one.”

Back on Crescent Drive, Ziskind acknowledged that Protect Our Neighborhoods will not get everything it has asked for, and that's an understandable concession.

“We’re not anti-vacation rental. We just want to put the round peg in the round hole,” he said. "We know, not everyone will win here. But, for the last eight years, we were always the losers.”

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The lush hedge of a vacation rental house, operated by the ACME House Company, located in the Movie Colony neighborhood of Palm Springs on Thursday, November 10, 2016.(Photo: Richard Lui/The Desert Sun)